Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said early on Saturday his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would visit Turkey next month and stressed his enthusiasm for peace talks in which Ankara could play a decisive role.
He made the remarks during a visit to Istanbul by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom he greeted as his “dear friend.”
After more than two hours of talks at the Vahdettin mansion in Istanbul, Erdoğan also backed Kyiv’s membership of NATO and offered a robust defense of Ukraine’s independence, declaring Russia’s invasion to have contravened international law.
Noting Turkey had made the “most effort” of any country in previous attempts at diplomacy and stressing Ankara’s role in a deal to allow Ukraine to export grain out of the Black Sea, Erdoğan insisted Turkey had the “most sincere desire” to see Kyiv and Moscow return to the negotiating table.
Zelenskyy also observed that “Turkey is ready to assume a leadership role” in Kyiv’s peace plan.
Both Erdoğan and Zelenskyy hoped the grain export deal would soon be extended, and the Turkish leader added it would make sense to start renewing it for longer timeframes than every two months. Erdoğan said he would initially discuss with Putin the idea of stretching the deal to three month stints, but then suggested the full program should be as long as two years to help combat hunger in poorer nations.
The Turkish president has played a strategic balancing act over the course of the war. While broadly condemning the illegality of Putin’s invasion and supplying Bayraktar drones to Ukrainian forces, Turkey has also emerged as a key route for sanctions avoidance and cannot afford to alienate Moscow because of its heavy energy dependence on Russia.
Erdoğan was quick to make a display of support to Putin during Yevgeny Prigozhin’s abortive mutiny last month, just as Putin had backed him amid the still highly opaque Turkish coup attempt of 2016.
